by Lora Roberts
“She died a natural death,” I said, scowling at Drake. “I didn’t even hear about it until after the memorial service.”
“Vivien’s death might have been put down to stroke or heart attack if it hadn’t happened around this other stuff,” he said.
“You mean, if I hadn’t been involved.” He didn’t contradict it. “How much longer before you arrest me?”
He scowled, turning away. “We don’t answer questions like that.”
Squabbling sounds came from the hall, and Claudia surged into Drake’s tiny office, closely followed by the clerk. “She insisted on seeing you, Detective Drake,” the clerk squeaked. “I couldn’t stop her.”
“Well, Liz.” Claudia treated the clerk and Drake with magnificent disregard. “Do you need a lawyer, or are they about ready to let you go home?”
“You’re out of line here, Mrs. Kaplan.” Drake spoke mildly, but the pencil he was holding snapped in two. “We’re not hot-boxing Liz. She wants to clear all this up as much as we do.”
“Well, if you have any more questions, you can ask them at my house. Liz is close to exhausted, as you could see if your glasses were any good.” The look she threw him was not friendly. “She’s not going to run away.”
“Vivien’s dead, Claudia.” I stared at my hands again, noticing a little line of dirt under my left index fingernail. “They want to find out if I did it.”
“And how would you do it, when you were assaulted yourself yesterday?” Claudia snorted. “Are you charging Liz? If not, she’s coming with me.”
There was a long silence while Drake and Claudia stared at each other. “She can go,” he said finally. “But,” he added, turning to me, “you’re not to be gallivanting around. Stay at Mrs. Kaplan’s, since she’s making herself responsible for you. Don’t go anywhere. If anything out of the ordinary happens, call immediately.” He picked up the broken pencil, looked at it as if wondering what had happened, and scrawled a phone number on a page torn from his “Far Side” desk calendar. “Don’t eat anything that arrives in the mail or as a delivery. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Claudia waved all this away. “We’ll be in touch,” she said carelessly, taking my arm. I was glad of her presence, glad she was battling on my behalf. A grayish fatigue had settled down on me, making it hard to stand and walk.
Drake came behind us down the hall. “I should lock you up for your own safety,” he muttered into my ear.
It was tempting for a moment to relinquish to him, to the system, to sit in a cell and let the process swirl around me. Then I saw myself in that little cell, and realized that I couldn’t give up, not yet, not ever. “I don’t want to be locked up,” I said, staring him in the glasses. “I would die.”
He blinked, and again I saw that uncertainty. “Oh, pour on the melodrama,” he scoffed, but he squeezed my hand briefly before holding open the door. “Remember what I said, or you just might be the next to go. And that would make me seriously annoyed.”
Chapter 25
Claudia detoured downtown and swooped into a fortuitous parking place in front of the Golden Crescent. “I need doughnuts,” she muttered, hauling her handbag off the seat between us.
“I’ll get them.” Despite Claudia’s increased mobility, it was my job to gofer.
“I can manage to hobble ten feet to the bakery.” Claudia sounded huffy. She pushed the button on her collapsible cane and planted it firmly on the pavement.
“You shouldn’t be walking around so much. I thought the doctor said to stay off that foot.”
“I’m using the cane.” Claudia flourished it triumphantly. “Actually, I’ve grown to like the cane. Very convenient for enforcing my point of view.”
“Okay, okay.” I didn’t want to get out of the car, really. What I wanted was to crawl into my bus and hibernate for a while, away from all contact with civilization. If I couldn’t have that, the front seat of a banged-up Honda would have to suffice.
Claudia stuck her head back into the car. “Now don’t go anywhere, Liz. If you’re gone when I come back I’ll assume you’ve been abducted by the murderer, and call Detective Drake.”
“I’m not stupid,” I grumbled, making myself comfortable. “I won’t blow it. And—um, I like the buttermilk bars.”
I watched Claudia through the bakery window while she pointed to things, and tried not to think about Vivien. Next door to the bakery, the card shop had witches and goblins and pumpkins plastered all over its windows. Walgreen’s on the corner had draped its display area with cheap costumes and pyramids made from bags of candy. Halloween makes me nervous—it’s a difficult holiday for someone who doesn’t live in a house. The only good thing about it, from my point of view, is that after it’s over, the candy goes on sale. The little Milky Ways are my weakness. Vivien liked the Three Musketeers—“They don’t bother my dentures,” she’d told me once.
Try as I might to think of something else, Vivien’s gentle face and voice filled my head. I put a hand over my eyes and wished I’d stayed at the police station. Though there wasn’t much I could contribute to the investigation, something might have come up that would help. Instead I’d allowed Claudia to drag me off and stuff me with undeserved treats. My eyes felt gritty; I thought of that bottle of painkillers the hospital had given me. Two of those and I could check out of my troubles until tomorrow. There were only ten in all—not enough for permanent sleep.
Claudia was still haranguing the woman behind the counter m the Golden Crescent. The sidewalks were full of people, a motley group of business suits both male and female, moms pushing strollers, older kids rollerblading and carrying skateboards, and a generous sprinkling of what the press likes to call the disadvantaged, some wearing clothes so ancient and dirty I could smell them from inside the car, pushing shopping carts filled with their possessions, checking out the trash receptacles along the sidewalk. I saw Old Mackie shambling along, his bottle snuggled into a paper bag in the front of his shopping cart. Weird Sam was beside him. It struck me that I was out of the loop in my community—not that I’d ever been deeply into it, but if these murders hadn’t involved me, I’d know all the gossip about Alonso and Pigpen, what was being said on the street, how much fear of the killer was affecting my vagrant kin. I would even be a little afraid myself, if it wasn’t for being so closely involved that I was a lot afraid.
Delores Mitchell came out of Walgreen’s, her nostrils looking distressed as Old Mackie wheeled past her. I sank deeper in my seat, hoping to evade her notice. It didn’t work. She stood right in front of Claudia’s car, waiting for the light to change so she could cross the street to the Federated Savings office. Glancing around impatiently while she waited, she saw me.
She smiled and came to tap gaily at the window until I rolled it down. “Hi, Liz. You’re in the passenger seat! Are you being chauffeured around? I never get to the bottom of you!”
“I wouldn’t even bother.” I tried not to sound as hostile as I felt. Delores was chic as ever in a bright fuchsia jacket with black trim and a short black skirt that showed off her well-exercised legs. Her Walgreen’s bag banged against the side of the car and she tucked it under her arm. Through the thin plastic of the bag I could see what it contained. “Delores—Reese’s peanut butter cups? Don’t they promote cellulite?”
She laughed a little self-consciously. “For the trick-or-treaters.” Her laugh died, and she looked earnestly at me. “I heard about Vivien. You must be feeling so bad, Liz. I know how fond of her you were.”
“She was a great person.” I didn’t want to discuss Vivien with Delores, whose responses always seemed tried on, as if she was shopping for the right thing to say.
“Well, no one lives forever.” Delores sighed heavily. “She was old. It was only a question of time.” Once more she peered earnestly at me. “Will your class keep on? I heard they weren’t going to give space to any group with less than ten students. How many do you have now? Maybe I could send you someone. I have a few elderly clients a
t the bank who might enjoy writing.”
“Thanks, Delores.” I reminded myself that grinding my teeth was bad for them. “I’ll manage.” Spotting Claudia coming through the door of the Golden Crescent, I sighed with relief. “Here comes my ride. I won’t keep you any more.”
Delores looked at the big box Claudia carried. “She must be having a party. So, are you staying with her?” Her eyes rounded, and she blushed. “I didn’t mean—I meant, is she hiring you—well, I worry about you, Liz. It’s just—nice that you’ve found a place. Off the street.” She blinked soulfully at me. “Vivien would have been pleased.” Claudia, coming out of the bakery, got the tail end of a misty smile as Delores passed, her heels clicking on the sidewalk.
“Who was that?” Claudia got into the car, handing me the box.
“Delores Mitchell. She’s some kind of veep at Federated Savings. I know her from the Senior Center; she gives financial planning seminars there.”
“Mitchell.” Claudia stared after Delores’s perky, retreating figure. “Her dad must have been old Stewart Mitchell. We got our first home loan from Federated. He was quite a guy—real macho type. Died from lung cancer a couple of years ago.” She shook her head and pulled away from the curb. “I remember sitting in his office, pregnant with Carlie, and Stewart was blowing smoke rings with the smelliest cigar I ever choked on. He wasn’t thrilled when I asked him to put it out.” Ahead of us, Delores crossed the street and vanished into the Federated office. “He should have left it out.”
Inelegantly, my stomach growled. I fingered the string around the doughnut box. It was almost noon. My body was hungry, but the notion of eating repelled me. I was tired, but unable to rest. So deeply frightened I was numb.
At least that’s what I thought. But a ride with Claudia driving had a way of separating the truly suicidal from those merely flirting with the idea. By the time Claudia parked in her driveway, I was grateful still to be alive. She limped up the steps, grumbling about the moron in the BMW who’d contested the last stop sign with her. She, of course, had won. In any encounter like that, the person who wants to keep his car in one piece is at a disadvantage.
Claudia put the kettle on, and I moved around, spooning coffee into a filter, finding myself a tea bag, trying to make the world normal. When I turned back to the table, cups in hand, she had opened the doughnuts and positioned a fresh pad of paper and a couple of newly sharpened pencils in front of her on the table.
“Thanks,” she said, accepting her coffee and plopping an enormous cinnamon roll on a napkin. “Help yourself.” She took a bite of roll and picked up a pencil. “I figure we have an hour at most. So let’s get started.”
I blew on my tea to cool it. “Started with what? I thought I was supposed to take a nap.”
She shot me an impatient look. “Don’t be dense, Liz. Your policeman will be by soon enough to check up and make sure you’re playing by the rules. In the meantime, we can make some progress without getting tangled up in their ridiculous bureaucracy.” She wrote the date of Pigpen Murphy’s last encounter with the world at the top of her paper in big letters. “Now. Tell me everything. The police believe there’s a clue somewhere in your memory. We’re going to find it.”
Chapter 26
“I’ve read a lot of mysteries.” Claudia took the cap off her pen. I reached for my knapsack and pulled out my own little notebook. If there was note-taking going on, I wanted to be part of it.
“Mysteries aren’t like life, Claudia.” I found my razor-point and faced her across the table. “In mysteries you have red herrings and plots. Here it’s all a mishmash. If the same person is doing this, which is by no means certain, what could possibly be the link between people like Pigpen and Vivien?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out.” Claudia began making lines on her tablet. “Pigpen’s was the first death. Let’s go back to that. What exactly did he say to you that night? Maybe there’s a clue in there.”
Her obvious relish for the exercise was the only thing that made me cooperate. I was sick of it all. Murder or death—it all began to seem irrelevant. We’re all dying; some of us just go faster than others. Vivien shouldn’t have died, but she was old and had often said she was ready to go when her time came. Alonso was too young to die, but on the other hand he wasn’t making much of his life. Pigpen was simply a blot on the landscape. Was that how the murderer had felt?
Claudia echoed my thoughts. “A person might think they were just putting people like Pigpen Murphy and Alonso out of their misery,” she remarked, scribbling busily. “Kind of tidying up Nature’s mistakes.”
“Unless they cooperated in the process, it’s still murder,” I pointed out. “I don’t want anyone standing in judgment of my life and deciding whether or not I deserve it.”
“Naturally,” Claudia said, faintly scandalized. “I wasn’t suggesting that such a course of action would be allowable. I was just trying to put myself in the murderer’s shoes.”
The murderer’s shoes. Tony’s boots made an appearance in my mental movie. He had gotten a construction job, even though he was too good for that kind of manual labor, and steel-toed boots were required. The job had lasted a couple of weeks, until he’d picked a fight with the supervisor. The boots lasted much longer. He would sit in the kitchen to clean them, rubbing the saddle soap into their creases. He even named them. “The shit-kickers,” he called them, lacing them up before he went drinking with his buddies. I knew he found them useful in brawls—those steel toes could really inflict pain. One morning after he’d come back from drinking and shown me how much pain, I had crawled off the living room sofa, and, moving carefully so as not to aggravate my newly bruised ribs, mixed up a gallon of Fix-All and poured it into his boots. That was the first time I left him.
Now I had to shut my eyes to stop the memory. Did he know where I was? Was it his hand I detected in these deaths—a gradual progression that would lead him to me? “I’m putting you in danger,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “First Vivien, then you, then me. I should leave.”
“You weren’t living with Vivien,” Claudia pointed out. “No offense, Liz, but I believe you’re taking too egocentric a view of the events here. Perhaps they have nothing to do with you.”
“They have me nearly arrested.” I put down my pen and felt gently around the back of my head. There was still a big knot there, the source of the headache that throbbed like a monotonous conga drum inside my skull. “Someone wants me out of the way—either in prison or dead. We both know that.”
Claudia leaned back with every appearance of enjoyment. “Now that’s where I think you’re wrong. I don’t think this murderer wants you dead at all. This is a pretty efficient killer, by all the evidence. If you were supposed to die, I think it would already have been arranged.” She took a big bite of doughnut. “My take on it is that you’re more valuable as a scapegoat than a victim. As long as you can’t put your finger on the common thread, you’re not a threat to the murderer. But if he can arrange to pin it on you—”
“An interesting theory.” Paul Drake spoke from the kitchen door. We both turned and gaped at him. I hadn’t heard a sound—he must have walked on the grass of the driveway to avoid the crunching gravel.
“You’re certainly sneaky, Detective Drake.” Claudia regarded him with disapproval. “And you’re early.”
He blinked. Some of the sternness went out of his face. “You were expecting me?”
“I figured you’d be around to pick Liz’s brain, since you didn’t get a chance at the station.” Claudia gestured magnificently toward the box of doughnuts. “Why else would I have gotten a dozen of these dangerous objects?”
Drake looked hungrily at then box. “You should have your doors locked,” he said, coming into the kitchen and demonstrating his point by locking the door behind him. He marched into the hall, and we could hear him checking the front door. “Even if there wasn’t someone out there knocking off Liz’s friends.” His voice floated down the hall t
o us, and then he came back in. “You should still keep your door locked.” He sat down at the table and pulled the box toward him. “Is there any coffee?”
I exchanged a look with Claudia and got a cup for Drake out of the dish drainer, pushing the carafe of coffee toward him. He sniffed it dubiously. “Who made this?”
“I did.” I poured him a cup. “Do you dare to drink it?”
“As long as it isn’t Mrs. Kaplan’s instant,” he answered cheerfully. Claudia tried not to smile.
“Have I ever told you, Detective, how much I deplore your manners?”
“Actually, I think you have.” He deliberated over the box, finally choosing a cinnamon twist. When he bit into it, his eyes closed. Even his granny glasses looked blissful. “Heavenly,” he breathed. “Is there any milk?”
This time I just pointed to the refrigerator. He waited on himself, and when he came back to the table he took a minute to look at Claudia’s notes. “Very neat,” he said approvingly. “Nice chart. Just like a mystery.”
Suspecting sarcasm, Claudia scowled at him. “Organization is the key to any scholarly undertaking,” she sniffed. “Perhaps you’d already have this killer behind bars if you tried it, Detective Drake.”
“I have my own methods,” he said, putting the doughnut down. “One of them is to interview those who might have important information. If you don’t want to go back to the station, Ms. Sullivan, you’re going to have to answer my questions fully and completely, with no interference.” He darted a look at Claudia, who raised her eyebrows innocently. “I prefer that spectators leave the room.”
“It’s my kitchen.” Claudia settled herself deeper into her chair and crossed her arms over her massive bosom. “And I intend to keep you from badgering my friend.”
Drake sighed impatiently. “This is not a game, Mrs. Kaplan. Your friend is in big trouble. I’m trying to help, which means I’m looking to uncover the truth. I do Liz the courtesy of believing that the truth will in her case make her free, and not a future resident of one of our overcrowded correctional institutes. So butt out or shut up; I don’t much care which.”
